Cold, Hard Facts About Airing Death Footage on TV

Finally, a judge gets the message. Citizens should have the opportunity to witness with their own eyes the outcome of laws and policies they endorse.

At least that would be one result from what an Ohio jurist is advocating.

Cuyahoga County Judge Anthony O. Calabrese Jr. wants to impose television on the death penalty. Not all death penalties in his state, just the one he ordered last month for a man convicted of fatally shooting two people in the head as they sat in the front seat of a van.

Calabrese apparently surprised no one when he accepted a jury’s recommendation and imposed the death penalty on Tyson Dixon (which could be either by the electric chair or lethal injection). The surprise came when the judge proposed that the execution be televised, and that it be accessible to other media as well.

As the case is under appeal, there’s no guarantee that Dixon’s scheduled Feb. 24 execution will happen. Despite scores of prisoners being sent to death row, none has been executed in Ohio since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1981. Even if Dixon is executed, though, there’s no evidence that television would readily accept the judge’s invitation and throw the camera switch.

Phil Donahue, who recently lost a court battle to televise an execution in North Carolina, says he would send a camera to Dixon’s Ohio execution but couldn’t promise that stations buying his syndicated talk show would air the episode.

In a telephone interview from Cleveland, Calabrese emphasized that his aim is not to shock anyone. He said he has no idea whether televising an execution would deter murder or whether it would serve either death penalty advocates or opponents of capital punishment.

Calling the double homicide “one of the most vicious, brutal, outlandish crimes” he’d encountered in his years practicing law, Calabrese said his only agenda was to demonstrate to the public, through television, that the criminal justice system is not soft on vicious criminals.

Seeing someone die in the chair just might do it.

“People in our community do not believe that people are punished for their acts,” Calabrese said, adding that if he were producing such a telecast, he’d precede the execution with footage of the crime scene and accounts of the victims’ deaths and the impact on their families. “Everybody ought to see this. It’s the people’s business.”

Yet local stations may not be persuaded that it’s their business.

“If they threw the doors open, I’m not sure we’d be there,” Paul Stueber, news director at ABC affiliate WEWS-TV, said from Cleveland. “I operate under the Fritz theory. He is my 4-yea-old nephew. I don’t want anything on my newscast that I would be embarrassed to explain to Fritz. The problem with television is that it just spills right out there.”

Calabrese says public response is running 80% to 90% in favor of his proposal.

“If enough people feel that way,” said Stueber, “rent a movie theater downtown and show it on closed circuit. I’m worried about forcing it down someone’s throat or appealing to baser nature.”

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Of course, there are some news executives who believe that appealing to baser natures is a commandment of their business.

Of the stations that would piously recoil at televising an execution, how many ran that 1993 Telemundo tabloid footage of a man gunning down his former wife in a Florida cemetery? Six Los Angeles stations did, and so did NBC.

How many showed the Super Bowl of suicides in 1987--footage of a Pennsylvania state official pushing the barrel of a .357 Magnum into his mouth and pulling the trigger at a press conference he called to orchestrate his own obituary? A bunch of stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio did.

“I was news director at Scranton, then, and we took about four seconds to decide we weren’t going to put that on the air,” said Stueber. He added, however, that he believes the Cleveland station he now works for did air the suicide footage.

Moreover, how many stations routinely show security camera footage of people getting blown away during robberies? Or have shown documentary footage of John F. Kennedy’s head exploding like a melon?

And how many continue to play Russian roulette by giving live coverage to police chases, whose potentially bloody outcomes cannot be predicted? Where was young Fritz on the day last June that television--every major network and just about every station everywhere--had chopper cameras monitor fugitive O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco ride as it was pursued by a fleet of police cars? No one knew whether a shootout was in the works when the car pulled into the driveway of Simpson’s home in front of all those live cameras. If there had been, you can believe that TV would have captured it, and to hell with Fritz!

The execution-telecast debate is not new. San Francisco public-TV station KQED, for example, sought in vain to televise the 1992 California execution of murderer Robert Alton Harris for use in a documentary.

Aired in the proper context, the very grisliness of the Harris execution might have been instructive to a society overwhelmingly in favor of capital punishment--a society increasingly in denial, whether by mentally severing the slaughterhouse from the meat on the plate or by separating the execution headline from the gruesome scene inside the execution chamber.

Death on camera has a tradition, from the televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 to shocking pictures of a young Viet Cong suspect being shot in the head at point-blank range by South Vietnam Police Chief Nguyen Loan in 1968.

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And death footage can have a beneficial impact, as it did recently when Alaska suspended its controversial wolf-control program after an Anchorage TV station showed pictures of a state official shooting a snared wolf five times in the head before it died, and footage of another wolf chewing off part of its leg in a futile attempt to escape from a trap.

The camera is an unimpeachable witness that lifts the veil of abstraction. Just as its presence is essential when local, state and federal government bodies convene to conduct the people’s business, so, too, is its presence necessary when an executioner carries out the people’s business, if not to effect a change in policy, then certainly to affirm that policy for its advocates.

To those who insist that televising an execution would be barbaric, meanwhile, Judge Calabrese replies about convicted slayer Dixon: “Pumping three bullets into the heads of his victims was barbaric, too.”